STOC

Howdy from Bethesda. Lots of theory bloggers here and I don't want to spend too much time on the computer so today just some announcements from an uncontroversial business meeting. 

Sampath Kannan gave a long talk about the NSF. In short, they have money, you should apply.

Salil Vadhan gave us a preview of the research nuggets from the Visioning Workshop held right before STOC 2008.

Shafi Goldwasser gave the Athena Lecture. The Gödel Prize was awarded.

Mitzenmacher gave the PC report: 77 papers accepted out of 321 submissions. Best Paper award jointly to:

• Public-Key Cryptosystems from the Worst-Case Shortest Vector Problem, Chris Peikert (SRI International)
• A Constructive Proof of the Lovász Local Lemma, Robin A. Moser (ETH Zürich)

Moser also won the Danny Lewin best student paper award.

Mitzenmacher mentioned a number of PC issues that he plans to discuss on his blog. Definitely worth following.

Aravind Srinivasan discussed local arrangements (which have been excellent). 255 attendees including 116 students. He suggested STOC could be held at universities in the future to keep costs down.

Richard Ladner gave the SIGACT report. About 1300 profession members and 160 student memberships down from 240 in 2004. To get the numbers up, student registrants at SIGACT sponsored conferences will get an automatic one-year membership.

You can still vote for me (or Madhu) in the SIGACT Elections until June 15.

Get your calendars ready:

• FOCS 2009 will be in Atlanta October 24-27.
• STOC 2010 will be in Cambridge, Massachusetts June 6-8. Complexity will also be held in Cambridge immediately afterwards.
• STOC 2011 will be part of FCRC June 4-11 which will also include Complexity, COLT, SPAA and EC.
• Silivio Micali announced a new conference, Innovations in Computer Science to be held January 4-7, 2010 in Beijing.
• Russell Impagliazzo publicly announced the Barriers Workshop, August 25-29, 2009.